Can the Big Apple help New Zealand find its swagger?

Tracy Watkins travelled to New York courtesy of Air New Zealand.

Gathered together in a room above New York’s Times Square more than 20 Kiwi CEOs and business leaders are waiting for the main act of their three-day long assault on Manhattan.

Indira Nooyi, the former chair and CEO of PepsiCo, is a rockstar of the business world, an Indian-American business executive who is consistently ranked among the top 100 most powerful women in the world.

Nooyi will have some competition. On a soundstage just below the meeting room another rockstar of sorts, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, is whipping up a crowd to promote his latest movie, Black Adam.

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But Nooyi doesn’t miss a beat; she’s here to talk to the delegation about how business must adapt to a complex and unfamiliar new global landscape. She’s also done her research; she arrives primed with ideas on what New Zealand needs to do to “get its swagger back”.

After two years of closed borders, it’s a question members of the business delegation have also been asking themselves.

Together the group is about as high-powered as it gets; it represents a big chunk of the New Zealand economy, and includes the CEOs of companies including BECA, Spark, Infratil, the Warehouse group, Ngai Tahu, NZ Beef and Lamb, Sanford, Mercury Energy and others.

No one dares joke about what would happen if the plane home went down.

Leading the group is Finance Minister Grant Robertson; what makes the trip unusual is that his Opposition off-sider, National deputy leader and finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis, is also on board. Both chip in with questions at the end of each of the off the record Q and A sessions with speakers lined up by Air New Zealand.

Speakers haven’t just included economic and political observers; the delegation was also connected with the network of Kiwi expats making it big in New York – people like Kiwi NBA star Sean Marks, who now heads the hugely successful Brooklyn Nets franchise, who talked about the culture of high performance sport.

There were more connections the evening before, at a soirée for New Zealanders in New York, hosted by Facebook power couple Kirsten and Craig Nevill-Manning, whose Manhattan apartment is famous for its three-story slide.

Willis sees it as a positive that she and Robertson were both on board.

“Air New Zealand approached me and my perspective is I want New Zealand to be an outward looking, ambitious, confident, growing country and so me being aware of what’s going on overseas and connected to those trends is really important.

“And I like the fact that when New Zealanders are offshore we are very much proud of our country and prepared to promote it no matter what side of politics we are on.”

Robertson echoes the sentiment: “We’re both selling New Zealand.

It’s no coincidence that the trip coincides with the launch of Air New Zealand’s flagship service flying direct to New York.

Hosted by Air NZ, the trip has copped some talk back flack home for the number of Air New Zealand board members and staff accompanying the delegation.

Some of the criticism has been centred on the trip taking place while the airline is still going through teething problems with its new direct route.

But Air New Zealand – and the Government – sees its investment in the route as vital for tapping into the premium end of the US market in New York, where much of America’s wealth and high-end consumers are located, not just tourists, but value added exports.

On the trip over, the plane was carrying 8000kg of cargo to New York, including flowers and seafood.

The direct route also cuts out the nightmare transit experience for passengers of changing planes in Los Angeles. As one American business insider stressed to the group in one of their sessions, it could not be underestimated the extent to which not having to transit will transform the attitude of New Yorkers about travel to New Zealand. Many would have previously dismissed the trip to New Zealand out of hand simply because of having to make two flights, he told them.

But at 16-17 hours, the trip is probably still at the outer edge of many people’s comfort zones and while the message Robertson and the rest of the delegation are spruiking in New York is that New Zealand is open for business, we are hardly alone.

The rest of the world is hustling just as hard, not only for tourists, or investment, but for skilled workers and expertise.

For Robertson, the business end of the trip is yet to come; when the business delegation wraps up Friday New Zealand Time he’ll be in Washington for talks with US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell ahead of meetings with the IMF and World Bank.

While Robertson will be looking for a readout from Powell on how recession fears will drive US monetary policy, those meetings are merely likely to underscore the gloomy tone of many of the briefings delivered to the Kiwi delegation, as the IMF warns of a global recession and US interest rate hikes continue to undercut the strength of the NZ dollar and fuel inflation.

No one is yet putting money on whether the world faces an orderly downturn or a global crisis.

Recession, and lasting disruption from the pandemic – have been the recurring theme of discussion during the off the record briefings delivered to the business delegation.

While on the surface the US has returned to normal, masks are still worn by a scattering of people on the streets of Manhattan and pop up Covid testing sites are still visible on city pavements.

And after two years of American workers staying home, the delegation heard that US businesses are grappling with many of the same workplace issues they are – including labour shortages and workers demanding more flexibility by resisting a return to the office.

But also weighing heavily on the tone of the meetings was the impact of rising geopolitical tensions, particularly between China and the US.

While media accompanying the business delegation were able to sit in on the briefings, most of the discussions operated under Chatham House rules, meaning they could not be reported.

One of the few who was prepared to go on the record was Andrew Browne, a partner at advisory firm Brunswick Group, who had also advised NZ trade and enterprise.

China takes 30 percent of New Zealand’s exported goods and services, making it our biggest trading partner.

Much of that is due to a free trade agreement negotiated in the early 2000s. But Browne said the environment had fundamentally changed in China since the FTA was negotiated and the ground had shifted significantly under businesses operating there.

“Whereas once China was optimised for growth, it is now optimised for security. (Businesses) are looking at a regulatory process that used to be pragmatic, that used to be predictable and has now become peremptory.”

China reclaiming Taiwan loomed increasingly large as a risk, however, and businesses were now having to factor that into their forward planning.

It’s the same message that has been pressed home by Robertson in his recent round of meetings with the business community back in New Zealand, behind closed doors.

In comments after Browne’s talk, Robertson – who was involved in the FTA in the early 2000s – said it had felt increasingly to him that dealing with China “was almost like (dealing with) a different country” to the one we negotiated with back then.

And he used China’s recent conflict with Australia as a warning that New Zealand could not be complacent.

China invoked a series of retaliatory trade measures against Australia in response to what it said was a list of 14 grievances.

“If you look at that list, New Zealand has done (many) of them,” Robertson said.

“And so while we haven’t had the same reaction back at us, there’s no reason that they can’t just invoke the same list of us at any given moment.”